She demonstrated that in 2009, when she tauntingly asked environmentalists worried about a possible development on the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone to buy the property themselves if they wanted to stop the development.

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She demonstrated that in 2011, when she met with the Ridgestone Unit 9 Homeowners Association and told them she could get up to $300,000 in city money to repair a drainage canal, but urged them to keep quiet about it so other neighborhood groups wouldn't start making demands of their own.

And we knew she could show a startling lack of compassion.

We saw that three years ago, when she pushed the council to slash funding for Volunteer Income Tax Assistance, a program that provided income-tax preparation services to more than 37,000 low-income earners at a negligible cost (less than one-thirtieth of 1 percent of the city's general-fund budget).

We hear all those facets of Chan's personality in the May 21 audio recording of the councilwoman discussing the city's proposed nondiscrimination ordinance with her staff, a recording made by former Chan aide James Stevens and examined in Chasnoff's column.

But we also hear something else — something Chan had been more successful in keeping under wraps during her four-plus years representing her North Side district on the council: sheer, undiluted ignorance.

For one thing, the Chan that we hear on the 16-minute recording sounds like she doesn't realize that sex between an adult male and a young boy is a criminal act in the eyes of the law. When her former policy chief Jeff Bazan says, “There's an organization out there that's trying to decriminalize sexual relations” between “adults and children,” Chan mistakenly thinks he says “criminalize” and urgently chimes in: “I think they should!”

When her aide, Roger LeGrand, floats the idea that most Americans can identify gay men simply by looking at their faces, Chan responds: “No, that's because they shave.” As the thread continues, she decides that “hormone shots” give gay men that purported identifiable look.

During her tirade against the idea of gays and lesbians being allowed to adopt children, she offers this nugget: “Is that not confusing? It's confusing. It is actually what you call, umm, suggestive, for the kids to be corrupt.”

This all plays into Chan's prehistoric view (still shared by a depressingly large segment of the public) that being gay is not part of a person's nature, but behavior fostered by a deviant cult of immorality that goes around brainwashing innocent minds — a behavior that can be prayed away.

The entire discussion feels like a Sexuality 101 tutorial for Chan, and she interrupts her state of cluelessness only when she finds it necessary to express her disgust.

During a painfully awkward explanation of the term “pansexual,” Chan sounds utterly lost. She asks how it's spelled, what it means, and, when Stevens openly wonders if it means “they want to have sex with nature,” Chan offers only a befuddled, “Oh.”

It's remarkable to consider that the person heard on that recording is one of only 11 San Antonians entrusted with voting on an ordinance that would extend civil-rights protections to members of the LGBT community. Chan doesn't understand any of the terms, she doesn't accept the people to whom the terms apply, yet she has significant power to impact their futures.

If elected officials recuse themselves from voting on issues on which they have a vested interest, I think they should also recuse themselves when they're too pathetically ill-informed to deserve a vote.

Chan represents the most politically conservative district in the city, and that might have blinded her to the fact that thousands of her constituents are members of the LGBT community.